Tears, Petals, and the P.D.R.

In a doctor's examining room in Hackensack yesterday, this hierarchy of objects, on a counter top, isolated from everything else...

Seated in a chair alongside the cabinet, I stared at the three stacked objects, struck by their shrine-like simplicity and bare, as-if-windswept surroundings.

A three-dimensional haiku with flowers and a hummingbird mediating between the potent medications in the Physicians' Desk Reference and the merciful tissues.

Or a thick red embankment. In our prescription-happy society, what broader base than the ultimate catalog of pills?

Above it the frail cardboard house, wallpapered inside-out with symbols of spring and hope, the single tissue rising like smoke from a gash in the roof.

And other lugubrious thoughts for a summer afternoon.

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Tags: Hackensack | photography